The Darkness (Optima) bot software is an advanced commercially available piece of malware developed by cyber criminals in Russia for the purpose of forming botnets to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal passwords, and use infected machines for traffic tunneling (as proxy servers) among other functions. Anyone can purchase a copy of Darkness (Optima) from various underground online forums for as low as $450 and as high as $999, depending on the number of add-ons, updates, and rebuilds the user desires.
The original bot, “Darkness” was released in 2009. After being very well-received by the underground cyber crime community, its command and control interface was revamped and dubbed “Optima”. The bot, now referred to by the double name Darkness (Optima), released its tenth iteration at the end of 2011. Its most common use is to perform various types of DDoS attacks using amassed botnets of infected hosts: HTTP floods, ICMP floods, SYN floods, and UDP floods.